An employee who worked the Christmas shift at Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center died after falling ill with COVID-19. The worker was one of at least 43 team members who had tested positive for coronavirus in the past few days, an outbreak possibly related to a team member who wore an inflatable party suit to lift their spirits.
The team member who briefly appeared in the emergency department on Christmas Day was wearing an air-themed Christmas outfit, according to a hospital executive. KNTV-TV, the San Jose NBC station that first reported the outbreak, reported that the suit was a inflatable christmas tree.
Inflatable clothes are usually battery powered and use a fan to keep them inflated. But this type of fan can also cause virus particles to travel much further in a room.
KNTV-TV reported that the person who died was a woman who worked as a clerk in the emergency room.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the people affected by this terrible loss. We are supporting our employees during this difficult time, ”said a statement released by the hospital on Sunday night.
In a statement on Saturday, Irene Chavez, senior vice president and area manager at the Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center, said officials were investigating whether the suit contributed to the outbreak.
“Any exposure, had it occurred, would have been completely innocent and quite accidental, like the individual [wearing the costume] he had no symptoms of COVID and only tried to lift the spirits of those around him during a period of great stress, ”said Chavez.
“At the very least, this should serve as a very real reminder that the virus is widespread, and often without symptoms, and we should all be vigilant,” said Chávez.
It was not immediately clear whether the person wearing the costume later tested positive for the coronavirus.
Chavez said the hospital will no longer allow air-powered fantasies on its premises and is taking steps to enforce safety precautions among staff, including no meetings in rest rooms, no sharing of food and drinks and wearing masks all the time .
The highly contagious coronavirus generally spreads through droplets that come out of a person’s mouth and nose, for example, when breathing, talking, coughing and sneezing, and usually reaches just six feet before falling to the ground. . People can be highly contagious with the virus, even without showing signs of illness.
Strong drafts can help the coronavirus infect other people. In one such case in the city of Guangzhou, in southern China, a pre-symptomatic person who had just returned from Wuhan – the first epicenter of the global pandemic – was having lunch at a restaurant with his family. The scientists concluded that this person infected two other families sitting at neighboring tables about three feet away; they suspect that the index patient’s infected droplets hitched a ride on air flows fed by an air conditioning system.
Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, San Jose is the largest city in Santa Clara County, the most populous county in Northern California, whose hospitals are suffering from overcrowding in their worst pandemic outbreak. On New Year’s Day, 97% of the standard capacity of ICU beds in the municipality of Santa Clara was occupied.
Santa Clara, where nearly 2 million people live, has the worst rate of coronavirus cases and deaths in the past week of any county in the bay area, according to a Times analysis. It recorded more than 74,000 cases of coronavirus and more than 740 deaths from COVID-19.
Last week, county officials said hospitals had reached their limit, with 50 to 60 patients a day trapped in emergency rooms waiting for a bed.
Often, the only way for a patient to be transferred to an ICU bed is because a COVID-19 patient died, said Dr. Marco Randazzo, an emergency physician at O’Connor Hospital in San Jose and St. Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy.
Each of the ICU beds at St. Louise Regional Hospital is full, and patients are now in emergency beds, said Gloria de la Merced, the hospital’s chief of operations, last week. “This level of hospitalizations never happened during my career,” she said. “If we go beyond the capacity to increase, everyone will be affected – more people in our community will know someone who has died.”
Across Santa Clara County, the daily rate of coronavirus cases is more than 10 times what it was on October 30. “What we are seeing now is not normal,” said Dr. Ahmad Kamal, Santa Clara County’s health preparation director, last week.
“This has been the state of the pandemic for the past few weeks and shows no sign of abating,” said Kamal.
Kamal pleaded with the public to continue wearing masks, staying socially aloof and canceling meetings.